How content writing can help the construction industry’s ageing workforce

by Anna Fozzard

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The construction industry faces a number of personnel challenges including negative perceptions of the sector and an ageing workforce. In an increasingly competitive jobs market, construction companies will need to start investing more in their employer brand in order to retain and recruit top talent. Content writing will be an important element of this.

What is an employer brand?

An employer brand is how your business is seen within the marketplace as an employer. This could be how potential new recruits see your company, or how current employees feel about you as an employer. Stats show that businesses that focus on creating a strong employer brand see 50% more qualified applicants and reduce their staff turnover by up to 28%. So it pays to invest in cultivating a good perception of your business.

How to use content to create a strong construction employer brand

By creating different types of content that showcase your company and your work, you can start to shift perceptions about the industry as a whole and promote your company as a great place to work. For instance, given that construction isn’t seen as a particularly innovative sector, using your website, creating case studies and writing press releases about new tech you’ve been using will help to change that perception.
Social media allows you to create content quickly and share it with a wide and varied audience. This can help you reach a different and more diverse pool of potential employees and is an easy and relatively cheap way to showcase your brand personality.
An internal website is also an incredibly useful tool. Not only does it allow you to relay company-wide messages, but you can start to build a sense of community within your company, allowing staff to be more engaged with each other and with the company brand.
A great way to boost retention and recruitment efforts is by championing your current employees. This can be through creating formal recognition programmes, showcasing them in personal case studies and using them in social media posts. It’s a great way to show you value your employees within your organisation and appreciate the role they play in its success. It’s also highly effective for building trust with prospective employees, as potential candidates trust employees 3x more than the employer to provide accurate information on working at the company.

How companies can use their employer brand to overcome challenges

The construction industry has an ageing workforce, which means the number of employees over 60 is increasing more than any other age group. This exposes the sector to a range of issues, which include:

  • Essential skills being lost when employees retire. As it stands, the experience and knowledge gained by older workers are at risk of being lost without a younger audience to pass it on to.
  • As employees get older, they may struggle to meet the physical burden of the job, causing a slow-down in productivity and serious health and safety risks.
  • While the skills and experience of older workers are highly regarded, it is acknowledged that a lack of younger workers could be stifling innovation within the sector.

The role of digitisation within the industry means there are now new, less physical roles available. These will involve designing and maintaining autonomous equipment, managing teams remotely, and working with 3D and virtual technologies to present and sell construction projects to their clients.
These roles will require a completely new skillset within the construction industry, so there’s a real opportunity to retrain and retain more experienced workers. Other employees who may have been put off the industry due to out of date expectations of the physical aspects of the job may now be attracted to the roles. It can also create a more diverse workplace, allowing those who may not be fancy working on a building site to enter the industry.
Creating content that highlights these new roles, showcases employee benefits and promotes internal training opportunities will allow companies to control the narrative of this new phase of the construction industry. In turn, this will help firms attract the top new talent and keep the expertise long-standing colleagues have gained.

How we can help

We’ve helped many companies communicate their selling points as an employer, including De Beers, Vestas and Clydesdale Bank. Get in touch with us today to talk about how we can help you find your voice.

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